What Is The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood?

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (often called the Pre-Raphaelites, abbreviated PRB) was an artistic movement of young British painters and sculptors founded in London in 1848. The seven founders were Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais, along with painters James Collinson and Frederic George Stephens, the sculptor Thomas Woolner, and the art critic William Michael Rossetti (Dante Gabriel's brother). The Brotherhood opposed the painting style taught at the Royal Academy of Arts and the conventions established by Sir Joshua Reynolds and other British academic painters, instead seeking a return to the truth, simplicity, and detailed realism of medieval and early Renaissance Italian art (before Raphael, hence the name "Pre-Raphaelite"). The movement remains one of the most significant in nineteenth-century British art history and continues to influence contemporary art, fashion, and decorative tradition in 2026.

The Hireling Shepherd, painted by William Holman Hunt, 1851. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

This guide explains the Brotherhood's name and introduces its seven founders, with a section each on the four less famous ones: James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens, Thomas Woolner and William Michael Rossetti. Later sections cover the principles behind pictures like Ophelia and The Light of the World, where to see them, what the painters believed, who sat for them, and how their ideas reached Art Nouveau and Morris wallpaper.

What is the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood?

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of artists founded in London in 1848 who sought to reform British painting by rejecting the conventions of the Royal Academy of Arts and returning to the principles of art before Raphael (1483-1520). Three young painters sat at the center of it. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the poet of the trio, and William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais were the other two.

Two more painters, a sculptor and a critic made up the rest of the seven, and the founders section below introduces them all. Among themselves they were simply the PRB, and they ran it like a secret society of young artists.

Their target was the Royal Academy painting of their own day. To them it looked artificially elegant, all classical poses and routine compositions, and they were young enough to say so. Millais, born in 1829, was still a teenager in 1848.

As a formal group it didn't last. Collinson went first, resigning in 1850, and in 1852 Woolner sailed for the Australian gold rush. The others drifted gradually into independent careers, though the friendships and much of the shared style held, and by 1853 the formal Brotherhood had effectively dissolved.

Meanwhile the circle around them kept growing. Ford Madox Brown, slightly older than the founders, was a major associated artist, and Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris came in from the late 1850s onward. Through the second half of the nineteenth century Henry Wallis and John William Waterhouse became associated with the Pre-Raphaelites too, as did Marie Spartali Stillman and many others. Plenty of painters now called Pre-Raphaelites were never in the Brotherhood at all.

The influence lasted far longer than the Brotherhood did. You can still trace it in the Aesthetic Movement and in Arts and Crafts design, which the last section of this guide follows.

Why are they called the Pre-Raphaelites?

The Brotherhood took its name from the principle of returning to art "before Raphael" (Raphael Sanzio, 1483-1520, one of the great masters of the High Renaissance). As they saw it, everything after Raphael had drifted toward polish and poses, and away from looking hard at real things and feeling something about them. So the Pre-Raphaelites looked further back, to the early Italian Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Their touchstones were painters like Giotto, Fra Angelico, Mantegna and Botticelli, in whose work they hoped to find a more truthful, heartfelt kind of painting.

What did those older painters have that British painting had lost? They had clear, bright color and nature observed in detail, and their faces looked like people you might pass in the street, with feeling that seemed meant. Their pictures also carried layered symbolism and a moral weight the young Englishmen found missing from their own century.

There was a dare in the name "Pre-Raphaelite," and it was deliberate. Calling yourself "before Raphael" set you against the whole academic tradition after him, which in England ran through Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy, and the style taught at the Royal Academy of Arts. It was open rebellion against the English art establishment.

The Pre-Raphaelites' quarrel with Raphael had two sides. Part of it was stylistic, a refusal of idealization and formulaic poses that extended to academic convention generally. The other part was philosophical: truth should come before beauty, they argued, and genuine observation before artificial composition.

None of this meant copying. The Pre-Raphaelites weren't after medieval pastiche, and nobody standing in front of Ophelia would mistake it for a fourteenth-century altarpiece. They took the spirit of early Renaissance painting, its honesty and its detail and its seriousness, and pointed it at nineteenth-century subjects in the visual language of their own day.

The result is distinctly Victorian, with medieval and early Renaissance references put there on purpose. The seven men who made it are introduced in the next section.

Who founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood?

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded by seven young men in London in 1848. The principal members, Rossetti, Hunt and Millais, were the most active painters and the movement's public faces.

Founder	Dates	Role
Dante Gabriel Rossetti	1828-1882	Painter and poet
William Holman Hunt	1827-1910	Painter
John Everett Millais	1829-1896	Painter
James Collinson	1825-1881	Painter, resigned in 1850
Frederic George Stephens	1827-1907	Painter, later an art critic
Thomas Woolner	1825-1892	Sculptor and poet
William Michael Rossetti	1829-1919	Secretary and chronicler, later an art critic

Rossetti, the son of an Italian exile, was a poet as well as a painter. Look at almost any Rossetti and a beautiful woman fills the middle of it, wrapped in symbols and saturated color. Many of the pictures people see in their heads when they hear "Pre-Raphaelite" are his, and his Romantic poetry deserves more readers than it has.

Hunt was a different kind of painter. He wanted detail you could check against nature and subjects with a moral or religious point, and he packed his pictures with allegory. "The Light of the World" (1851-1853) and "The Awakening Conscience" (1853) made his name.

Millais had the most technical skill of the seven, and he showed it early: at age eleven he became the youngest person ever admitted to the Royal Academy schools. His work joined detailed realism to elegant composition. His "Ophelia" (1851-1852) became one of the most famous Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

The founders were at their closest in 1848 and 1849, meeting regularly while William Michael kept the private PRB Journal, and his later books are still a main source on those years. The Germ, their published magazine, came out in 1850.

The other four founders are easier to overlook than Rossetti, Hunt and Millais, so the next four sections take them in turn, starting with the first to leave.

Who was James Collinson?

James Collinson (1825-1881) was the Brotherhood's most religious founder, and the first to leave it. He was born in Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, the son of a bookseller, and started at the Royal Academy schools in 1841, at sixteen. By 1847 he was showing pictures like "The Charity Boy's Debut," a boy in a new charity-school uniform being fussed over by his family, painted with the close attention the PRB would soon turn into a creed.

Mother and Child by a Stile, painted by James Collinson. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

His faith pulled him in three directions in as many years, and it cost him both an engagement and his place in the Brotherhood:

• Around 1847: he became a Catholic, probably under the influence of the painter John Rogers Herbert.
• 1848: he went back to the Church of England so he could be engaged to Christina Rossetti.
• 1850: his return to Catholicism ended the engagement. That May he resigned from the Brotherhood, after Millais's "Christ in the House of His Parents" was attacked as blasphemous, because he felt the group was bringing religion into disrepute.
• 1853: he went to Stonyhurst College in Lancashire to train as a Jesuit priest, and left a year later.

His big Brotherhood picture is "The Renunciation of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary" (1850), which hangs in the Johannesburg Art Gallery. The paintings more worth hunting down are the quiet ones. "Answering the Emigrant's Letter" (1850), a working family writing back to a relative overseas, is at Manchester Art Gallery, and "The Empty Purse" (1857), a young woman at a charity bazaar with nothing left to spend, is at Tate Britain.

He married Eliza Wheeler, John Rogers Herbert's sister-in-law, in 1858, and their son Robert Vincent Collinson was born in 1864. From 1861 to 1870 he was secretary of the Society of British Artists, which paid the bills alongside the painting. He died at Camberwell, in south London, on January 24, 1881, at 55.

Who was Frederic George Stephens?

Frederic George Stephens (1827-1907) was the founder who gave up painting and spent the next half century writing about it. He was born in London, went to University College School, and entered the Royal Academy schools in 1844, where he got to know Millais and Hunt. Four years later he was one of the seven.

Frederic George Stephens, by John Everett Millais. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

You can still find his face in other men's paintings. Millais used him as Ferdinand in "Ferdinand Lured by Ariel" (1849), and Ford Madox Brown painted his head for Christ in "Jesus Washing Peter's Feet."

His own canvases are much harder to find. By the early 1850s he had more or less stopped, and he later said he had destroyed a good deal of his work himself. The few that survive are at Tate.

Writing suited him much better. He contributed to The Germ, and for some forty years, until 1901, he was the art critic of the Athenaeum, the leading literary and art weekly of the day. That made him one of the most read critics in Victorian Britain.

He stood up for his old friends without going easy on them. When the Millais exhibition went up in 1898, after the painter's death, Stephens took him to task for the weaker work of his commercial years. At the British Museum he wrote most of the entries in the first volumes of its Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires, Hogarth's prints among them, and scholars still reach for those volumes.

He married Rebecca Clara Dalton in 1866. Their son, Holman Fred Stephens, carried Hunt's name and grew up to build and run rural light railways, the Kent and East Sussex among them. Stephens died at home in Hammersmith on March 9, 1907, and is buried in Brompton Cemetery.

Who was Thomas Woolner?

Thomas Woolner (1825-1892) was the only sculptor among the seven, and a poet as well. Born in Hadleigh, Suffolk, he went to work in William Behnes's London studio at about twelve and joined the Royal Academy schools in 1842. His little "Puck" (1847), Shakespeare's fairy grinning on a toadstool, was admired a year before the Brotherhood began, and his poem "My Beautiful Lady" appeared in the first issue of The Germ.

Bust of Alfred Lord Tennyson, sculpted by Thomas Woolner. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Sculpture commissions were thin in early 1850s London, so in July 1852 he sailed for the Australian gold rush. Months of digging around Bendigo and Mount Alexander turned up next to nothing. He made a few portrait medallions in Melbourne and Sydney instead, and was back in London by October 1854.

His leaving had one result nobody planned: it gave Ford Madox Brown the idea for "The Last of England" (1855).

The second London run went far better. Portrait busts and medallions of Tennyson, Carlyle, Browning, Wordsworth and Darwin made him one of the leading sculptors of his generation, and the Tennyson bust above is one of several he made of the poet, a close friend. His John Stuart Mill went up on the Thames Embankment in 1878, and his Stamford Raffles was unveiled in Singapore in 1887. The Royal Academy elected him an associate in 1871 and a full member in 1874, and he was its Professor of Sculpture from 1877 to 1879.

In 1864 he married Alice Gertrude Waugh, whose sister Fanny married Holman Hunt the next year, so two of the founders ended up brothers-in-law. Woolner and Alice had six children. He died in London on October 7, 1892, and is buried at St Mary's, Hendon. If you're ever in the Lake District, his Wordsworth memorial in St Oswald's Church, Grasmere, is worth going out of your way for.

Who was William Michael Rossetti?

William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919) was the founder who never painted, and the one who outlived all six of the others. He was born in London on September 25, 1829, a year after Dante Gabriel and a year before Christina, into a bilingual Italian and English household. His father, Gabriele Rossetti, was an Italian political exile who taught Italian at King's College London, and with Maria, the eldest, there were four children in all.

William Michael Rossetti, photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron, 1865. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Money shaped his life more than art did. At fifteen, in 1845, he took a clerk's desk in the Excise office at £80 a year, because the family needed a steady wage, and he stayed with it (the office became part of the Inland Revenue in 1849) until he retired in 1894 as an Assistant Secretary. That's forty-nine years of tax paperwork by day, with the criticism and the editing squeezed into evenings and weekends.

Inside the Brotherhood he held the pen. As well as keeping the journal, he edited all four issues of The Germ. Through the 1850s and 1860s he defended Pre-Raphaelite painting in the Athenaeum and the Spectator, and Hunt, Millais and his brother could count on him in print.

The editing is where his name really lives on, and after each of his siblings died he gathered up what they had left. His main editions were these:

• 1868: Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, the first British edition of the poems, and for most British readers their first meeting with Whitman.
• 1874: Blake's poems.
• 1886: Dante Gabriel's collected poems.
• 1896: Christina's New Poems.

Of his own books, "Some Reminiscences" (1906) is the one to read first.

In 1874 he married Lucy Madox Brown, a painter and the daughter of Ford Madox Brown, which tied the Rossettis to the wider circle by marriage as well as friendship. He lost Lucy in April 1894 and Christina that December. He died in London on February 5, 1919, at 89, and lies in the Rossetti family grave at Highgate Cemetery.

With the seven founders introduced, the rest of this guide turns to the work itself, starting with the principles behind it.

The four principles behind the work

The Pre-Raphaelite principles articulated in the Brotherhood's early documents emphasized truth, detail, sincerity, and a return to authentic artistic feeling. Four main principles were set down later, in William Michael Rossetti's account of 1895:

1. To have genuine ideas to express. Superficial subjects were out, because a painting had to carry serious moral or emotional content, or a real idea, and mean something beyond its surface.
2. To study nature attentively, so as to know how to express the ideas. That's where all the famous Pre-Raphaelite detail comes from: plants and animals were painted from direct observation, not convention, and fabric, geology and anatomy got the same treatment. Millais's Ophelia, described below, is the famous case.
3. To sympathize with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote. It meant lining up with the genuine emotional and moral content they saw in pre-Renaissance art and turning away from post-Renaissance academic convention.
4. To produce thoroughly good pictures and statues. This is the plainest of the four, and a reminder that for all the ideology they believed in serious work and a high standard of execution.

You can spot the look across a gallery. The color is bright, often laid over a white ground that gives it extra luminosity, and plants and flowers are painted almost leaf by leaf. Anatomy is accurate, the symbolism can be complex, and the people often look ordinary rather than idealized.

For subjects, the Pre-Raphaelites went to their bookshelves. Medieval poetry was a big one, Dante and Chaucer especially, along with Arthurian legend, and biblical themes were common too. Romantic poetry and contemporary literature supplied the rest, Tennyson and Keats in particular, and Shakespeare, which is how Ophelia got in.

The paintings came out rich in literary and symbolic content, and in emotion. The next section looks at the best known of them.

Six famous paintings and where to see them

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and the broader Pre-Raphaelite circle produced many famous paintings now housed in major British and international museum collections. Tate Britain has the most complete collection of Pre-Raphaelite painting, with major works by all the founders and the broader circle.

Painting	Artist	Date	Where to see it
Christ in the House of His Parents	Millais	1849-1850	Tate Britain
Ophelia	Millais	1851-1852	Tate Britain
The Light of the World	Hunt	1851-1853	Keble College, Oxford
The Awakening Conscience	Hunt	1853	Tate Britain
Beata Beatrix	Rossetti	1864-1870	Tate Britain
The Death of Chatterton	Henry Wallis	1856	Tate Britain

Christ in the House of His Parents marked the public emergence of the Pre-Raphaelite style. It puts the young Jesus among his family in Joseph's carpentry workshop, with realistic detail and ordinary faces, and Charles Dickens famously attacked it in his magazine Household Words for that unidealized Holy Family.

Millais painted Ophelia a couple of years later. Shakespeare's drowned Ophelia, from Hamlet, floats in a stream among precisely painted flowers and plants. He did the background outdoors on the Hogsmill River in Surrey and the figure indoors, with Elizabeth Siddal modeling in a bathtub.

Hunt's The Light of the World shows Christ holding a lantern at a closed door, which represents the human heart. It became one of the most widely reproduced Victorian religious paintings, and a later version (painted about 1900-1904, now in St Paul's Cathedral) toured internationally in 1905-1907.

In The Awakening Conscience, also by Hunt, a young woman rises from her lover's lap at a moment of moral awakening. Symbolic detail fills the room around her.

Rossetti's Beata Beatrix shows Beatrice from Dante's Divine Comedy, modeled on his deceased wife Elizabeth Siddal. It's one of his most personal and elegiac works.

Henry Wallis was never in the Brotherhood, but The Death of Chatterton belongs here. It shows the seventeen-year-old poet Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), who died by suicide in his garret room, and it became famous and influential.

Five of the six are at Tate Britain, so one afternoon in London covers most of the list, though it's wise to check what's on display first. We'd see Ophelia first, then Beata Beatrix, because it's the same face, Siddal's, painted more than a decade apart. Only The Light of the World means a trip to Oxford.

Millais's "Mariana" (1850-1851) and Hunt's "The Hireling Shepherd" (1851), the painting at the top of this page, are other major Pre-Raphaelite paintings from the early years. Rossetti's "Lady Lilith" (1866-1873) is later, and Edward Burne-Jones's "The Golden Stairs" (1880) and John William Waterhouse's "The Lady of Shalott" (1888) later still. Beyond Tate Britain, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and Manchester Art Gallery hold significant Pre-Raphaelite paintings, as does the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Several of these pictures are religious, which raises the question of what the painters themselves believed.

Were the Pre-Raphaelites Catholic?

The Pre-Raphaelites were not unified by Catholicism, though some members had Catholic sympathies or interests. Most were nominally Church of England (Anglican), and a few leaned Catholic or High Church Anglican.

The clearest case is James Collinson. His moves between the two churches, and the resignation they led to in 1850, are set out in his section above.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti is harder to pin down. His father was nominally Catholic and his mother Anglican, and the family's Italian heritage gave him some Catholic cultural ties. His paintings often draw on Catholic Marian and religious imagery, but he cared more for how Catholicism looked than for what it taught.

William Holman Hunt sat at the other end. His faith was Evangelical and intensely personal, and you can read it in the symbols packed into his pictures. He went as far as the Holy Land (Palestine, then under Ottoman rule) so his biblical scenes would carry Middle Eastern detail he believed was historically accurate. That's a long way to go for a background.

The broader circle was more mixed still. Anglican High Churchmen sat alongside agnostics and secular humanists, and the Aesthetic Movement that came after was no more united. Plenty of single pictures take religion seriously, but the movement as a whole never agreed on it.

Their religious art is a clearer matter. The Brotherhood took religious subjects seriously and painted them with attempts at historical realism, not conventional religious idealization. That was sometimes controversial, as Dickens's attack on Millais's "Christ in the House of His Parents" showed, but it came from the same commitment to truthful observation.

Who was the most famous Pre-Raphaelite model?

The most famous Pre-Raphaelite model was Elizabeth Siddal (1829-1862), who modeled for John Everett Millais (notably in Ophelia), then for Dante Gabriel Rossetti (who became her primary artistic partner and eventual husband). She was working in a hat shop when the Pre-Raphaelites first saw her. Within a few years hers was one of the most painted faces in Victorian art.

She and Rossetti married in 1860, after years of engagement, and it was not a happy marriage. In 1862 Siddal died of a laudanum overdose, and Rossetti's grief went into some of his most powerful paintings, Beata Beatrix among them. She was a poet and painter herself, though her own creative work has been largely overshadowed by her role as a model.

Siddal wasn't the only face that mattered. Four others are worth knowing by name:

• Jane Burden: she married William Morris and became Jane Morris, and later she was Rossetti's lover and his primary muse of those years.
• Fanny Cornforth: she modeled for many Rossetti paintings, especially his women in opulent dress.
• Annie Miller: Hunt was one of several painters who painted her.
• Marie Spartali Stillman: she was both a model and a painter in her own right.

The painters often used friends and family as models, so the same sitters turn up in paintings by different artists. Sharing models like that did a lot to give the Brotherhood its shared style.

Today some of the models are more famous than the paintings they appear in. Siddal is the obvious example. Jane Morris and Fanny Cornforth have biographies of their own now, as muses and as women with full lives in artistic London.

The Brotherhood's long reach into later art

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood influenced British art significantly through the second half of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century. It reached well past painting, into design and the decorative arts.

The Aesthetic Movement (1860s-1890s) drew heavily on Pre-Raphaelite vocabulary, Rossetti's above all: his emphasis on beauty and rich color, and his decorative detail. You can see it in Whistler and Burne-Jones, and in Aubrey Beardsley's black-and-white line, along with plenty of other Aesthetic Movement artists.

For us, the Arts and Crafts Movement (1860s onward) is the line that matters most. It grew out of the Pre-Raphaelite circle through William Morris and his collaborators, and Morris's commitment to handicraft came directly from his time around Rossetti and Burne-Jones, as did his faith in traditional materials and integrated decorative arts. Hang a Morris wallpaper next to a Rossetti and the debt is plain, and the same goes for his textiles, furniture and stained glass.

Later in the century the Symbolist and Decadent movements took dreams, and medieval and literary subjects, from Pre-Raphaelite imagery. They also took the beautiful woman in an elaborate setting, which was very much Rossetti's territory, and his style came with her. The trail runs on into the European Symbolism of the late nineteenth century, in France and Belgium and elsewhere.

Art Nouveau (1890s-1910s) picked up Pre-Raphaelite decorative vocabulary, the flowing botanical forms especially and the beautiful female figures, along with the idea of integrated decorative arts. Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Alphonse Mucha worked in styles that descend partly from Pre-Raphaelite tradition, as did other Art Nouveau artists.

Poetry and photography felt it too. Christina Rossetti, whose New Poems William Michael edited, ranks with Algernon Charles Swinburne among the most important Victorian poets. Julia Margaret Cameron, who took the portrait of William Michael Rossetti above, drew on Pre-Raphaelite visual ideas in her photography.

It's still going in 2026. The Arts and Crafts decorative tradition is active in wallpaper and textiles, and medieval and Romantic imagery still has wide appeal. Pre-Raphaelite paintings stay popular in museum exhibitions, while the long hair and flowing dresses keep coming back in fashion and romantic styling.

The Arts and Crafts Movement guide picks up the broader decorative tradition that descended from these Pre-Raphaelite roots.

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood questions

What is the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood?

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was an artistic movement of young British painters and sculptors founded in London in 1848 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais, along with painters James Collinson and Frederic George Stephens, the sculptor Thomas Woolner, and the art critic William Michael Rossetti. It opposed the style taught at the Royal Academy and wanted to bring back the truth, simplicity and detailed realism of art before Raphael (1483-1520). As a formal group, though, it had effectively dissolved by 1853.

Why are they called the Pre-Raphaelites?

The Brotherhood took its name from the principle of returning to art "before Raphael" (Raphael Sanzio, 1483-1520). They admired painters like Giotto and Fra Angelico, from the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Next to them, the young artists felt, everything after Raphael looked staged and academic, and further from what an eye actually sees.

Who was the most famous Pre-Raphaelite model?

Elizabeth Siddal (1829-1862) is the most famous Pre-Raphaelite model. If you've seen Millais's Ophelia, you've seen her; she went on to model for Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whom she later married, and hers became one of the most painted faces in Victorian British art. Jane Burden (later Jane Morris), Fanny Cornforth, Annie Miller and Marie Spartali Stillman sat for them too.

Why were the Pre-Raphaelites against Raphael?

The Pre-Raphaelites believed that Raphael and the academic painting tradition that followed him had introduced artificiality, idealization, and formulaic conventions that distanced art from genuine observation and authentic emotion. The real target was nearer home, though: the Royal Academy, whose teaching descended from Raphael's tradition through Sir Joshua Reynolds and others, and which they felt had lost the heartfelt truthfulness of pre-Renaissance Italian painting. Raphael himself was more symbol than enemy, and the objection was as much philosophical (truth over beauty) as stylistic.

Were the Pre-Raphaelites Catholic?

The Pre-Raphaelites were not unified by Catholicism. Most members were nominally Church of England (Anglican), though James Collinson reconverted to Roman Catholicism in 1850 and resigned from the Brotherhood. Hunt, by contrast, was an Evangelical Protestant Christian. Rossetti grew up in an Italian family in London, with Catholic ties on his father's side, and the wider circle held every kind of belief.

What is the meaning of Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood?

"Pre-Raphaelite" means "before Raphael" (Raphael Sanzio, the High Renaissance Italian painter, 1483-1520). The word "Brotherhood" signaled a deliberate organization, like-minded young artists with a shared artistic program (seven of them, in this case). Read together, the two words are a small manifesto for taking British painting back to early Renaissance Italian principles and away from the Royal Academy's academic style.

How did the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood influence later artists?

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood influenced the Aesthetic Movement (which drew on Pre-Raphaelite vocabulary), the Arts and Crafts Movement (which developed from the Pre-Raphaelite circle through William Morris), the Symbolist and Decadent movements (which drew on Pre-Raphaelite imagery), and Art Nouveau (which drew on Pre-Raphaelite decorative vocabulary). The Arts and Crafts link dates most easily: Morris joined the circle from the late 1850s, and the movement followed from the 1860s. Poetry felt it too, and so did early photography.

Where can you see Pre-Raphaelite art?

Tate Britain holds the most comprehensive collection of Pre-Raphaelite painting in the world. Elsewhere in England, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and Manchester Art Gallery hold significant Pre-Raphaelite paintings, and so do the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and the Ashmolean in Oxford. In the United States, try the Fogg Museum at Harvard or the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; many other major museums have some too. Millais's Ophelia and Rossetti's Beata Beatrix are at Tate Britain; Hunt's The Light of the World is at Keble College, Oxford.